Only then did the books become accessible to students, and they took to the novels with an enthusiasm that made the author "the biggest thing to hit the 'youth market' in years," according to
New York Times Magazine reporter Mitchell S. Ross. Much of Robbins's popularity among young readers, most critics have agreed, can be attributed to the fact that his novels encompass the countercultural "California" or "West Coast" school of writing, whose practitioners also include the likes of Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan. In the words of R. H. Miller, writing in a
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook piece, the West Coast school emphasizes "the themes of personal freedom, the pursuit of higher states of being through Eastern mysticism, the escape from the confining life of urban California to the openness of the pastoral Pacific Northwest. Like the writings of his mentors, Robbins's own novels exhibit an elaborate style, a delight in words for their own sake, and an open, at times anarchical, attitude toward strict narrative form."
All of these qualities are evident in the author's first novel, Another Roadside Attraction.
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